Cost per coding-agent request

Is Claude Fable 5 or Codestral cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Claude Fable 5 costs 36x as much as Codestral per request ($0.25 vs $0.0070 on our measured traffic), because Claude Fable 5 lists at $10 input, $1 cached input and $50 output per million tokens against $0.30, $0.03 and $0.90 for Codestral.

List prices: Anthropic pricing, Mistral API pricing, checked 2026-10-13. Request costs: Standard Compute gateway data, 79,301 coding-agent requests from 75 users, Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026. How we compute this

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	Codestral	Fable 5
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0043	$0.16
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.011	$0.38
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.0070	$0.25
100 requests	$0.70	$25.04
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.084	$3.04
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$8.91	$317

Each logged request priced at the vendor’s list rates for its own token counts, including cache reads and any higher rate for long prompts. Average output: 698 tokens per request. Both models are priced on the requests up to 256K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

What to watch for

Codestral's 256K window cannot take 13% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. Claude Fable 5 is superseded: Claude Fable 5.1 costs $0.24 per request.

FAQ

Is Codestral cheaper than Claude Fable 5 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.70 on Codestral and $25.04 on Claude Fable 5. A median 16-request session costs $0.084 vs $3.04. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 256K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of Fable 5 vs Codestral cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $317 on Claude Fable 5 and $8.91 on Codestral at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Claude Fable 5 vs Codestral: which is better for agents?

Claude Fable 5 scores higher on output quality (9.0/10 vs 3.4/10), while Codestral is the cheaper option. Claude Fable 5 is best for existing Fable 5 setups that have not yet moved to Fable 5.1 or Opus 5.5; Codestral is best for fast completions and lightweight code edits. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Claude Fable 5 and Codestral in the same agent?

Yes. Model-agnostic agents (Cline, Aider, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, OpenCode) let you swap models per task. Many people route hard tasks to the stronger model and routine work to the cheaper one.

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

Agentic Ability

Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks

Speed

Tokens per second and time-to-first-token

Value for Money

How much capability you get per dollar

Reliability

Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Current Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models run on Standard Compute

Standard Compute

Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra

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